Talk:Link Joker/@comment-1952385-20141130221900/@comment-4292163-20141215171358
Okay, when I said I didn't want to belabor anything, I meant it, but since you're asking legitimate questions I'll answer those: "surprise in this deck is not making a hard choice but forcing my opponent to change their set up on the fly in order to deal with the different bosses I use" That's basically the same as what I said, only less broad. You tricked your opponent into choosing a particular setup, then changed your own setup to make their choice wrong. But as I said, the problem with that is that the cost your opponent pays to change setup is pretty small, usually losing about 1 or 2 cards, and you've already paid a similar cost to change your own setup. I don't understand why you think this is a significant advantage. "as for reliability I have had no problems on that end care to explain where that so called issue is" To illustrate what I'm talking about here, let's compare two fairly similar choices you've made: Halfnium and Nebula Lord. They have identical secondary abilities, so the only thing to compare is their power gaining. Halfnium forces an extra 10k shield per turn from Legion and 5k shield every time you lock. Nebula, assuming you scale to roughly 16k as you've done here, forces maybe 5k from one lock, 15k from two locks and 30k from three locks. Notice that Halfnium is superior unless you can consistently lock 3+ rearguards a turn, and that for each turn you're not locking 3 rearguards you're forcing at least an extra 10k from Halfnium, but as little as nothing from Nebula. Do you really think the times you ride Nebula will be as strong as the times you ride Halfnium? This is the first kind of reliability issue this strategy has - you're mixing strong cards and weak cards, when you could just be using strong cards. This is what I meant before when I said "all those options have to be equally good or else you're just hamstringing yourself." Next, notice that I said "assuming you scale to roughly 16k" in the above example. I said that because with proper scaling, you can squeeze extra plusses out of Nebula Lord. Radon in front of Binary Star will force an extra 5k shield when two cards are locked, for example, enough to make Nebula compete with Halfnium! With proper support, Nebula can match and even surpass Halfnium, but you're not providing that support because your other bosses need support as well. This is the second kind of reliability issue this strategy has - many of your cards, such as Nebula, Freezeray and Dark Zodiac, need special support to reach their full potential, and splitting your focus prevents that. "to Emmic optimal performace and personal play style doesn't always mesh well" I hate being "that guy", but you if you know you can't play a deck right but still take it to a tournament hoping to win, you're going to be disappointed. If something like playstyle is getting in the way of your deck working, then you should probably be doing something to fix that. Change to a deck that better fits your playstyle, change your playstyle to better fit your deck, etc. etc. As a closing note, some of your posts have been coming off a little hostile ("care to explain where that so called issue is", etc.) whether you intended it that way or not. I'm not really looking for a screaming match, so unless you're legitimately curious about what I've posted rather than just being argumentative, I'd prefer not to drag this out with more responses. Also, it's fine if you can't follow through with all the suggestions given because you have trouble getting cards, but even if you say something vague like "I live in South Africa", as a stranger in another country I don't really know which cards you do or don't have access to, so I can't tailor my suggestions to your needs. Sorry.